Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
The door was already open.
Eleanor was on the other side of it. She had taken off the dark jersey she had been wearing earlier and put on the cardigan she had been wearing on the night of the storm.
Her feet were bare. The hall light was the small one — the standing lamp at the bottom of the stairs, not the overhead — and it caught the side of her face the way the fire had caught it the night before.
Chloe came in.
Eleanor closed the door.
She locked it.
She turned.
“Coat.”
Chloe handed it across. Eleanor hung it on the second hook from the left. She did not, this time, settle the collar. She turned back. She placed her hand against the side of Chloe’s neck — palm warm against the jaw, thumb at the small dip beneath the ear — and she looked at her.
“Are you sure.”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I’m sure.”
She kissed her.
It was not the kiss from the night before.
It was the kiss the night before had been keeping in.
Eleanor’s mouth on hers was open, warm, slow at first and then less slow — a kiss that did not, at any point in its first ten seconds, ask.
Chloe’s back found the wall of the hall without either of them having to move it there.
Her hands found Eleanor’s waist under the cardigan.
The wool was rough; the cotton of the shirt beneath was thin.
Eleanor’s hand stayed on her jaw.
Eleanor’s other hand came up. Fingers in Chloe’s hair, at the base of her skull, holding the back of her head.
Chloe made a sound she did not, in the moment, register having made.
Eleanor pulled back. Two inches. Her mouth against the corner of Chloe’s.
“Through here.”
She did not let go of her.
The sitting room.
The fire was lit. The standing lamp was on. The two armchairs from the previous evening had been pushed back; the rug between them — old, worn at the centre, the colour of red wine — was wider than Chloe had previously registered.
Eleanor turned her by the shoulders.
Her hands were, Chloe registered as they took the hem of her jumper, not quite steady.
It was the same small fact she had registered on the night of the storm at the pour of the second glass.
The same fractional unsteadiness. Eleanor noticed her noticing.
Eleanor did not, this time, look away from it.
She let Chloe see her hands. The seeing was — Chloe registered, the small honest part of her now permanently active — its own admission.
She took the hem of Chloe’s cream jumper in both hands and lifted it. Chloe raised her arms. The jumper came off. Eleanor folded it once and dropped it on the nearest armchair.
She kissed her again.
Chloe found the front of the cardigan. Three buttons. She undid the top one. Eleanor’s hand caught hers — not stopping her, only following — and undid the other two with her.
The cardigan came off Eleanor’s shoulders. The shirt underneath was the thin cotton one Chloe had seen at the hall door. It was white. It was soft. It had a small tear at the second buttonhole.
Eleanor lowered them both to the rug.
Chloe’s back against it. Eleanor above her. The fire to their left. The lamp behind them, throwing the long shadow of Eleanor’s shoulder across the rug, across Chloe’s bare arm, across the small space between them.
Eleanor kissed her throat.
Then her collarbone.
Then lower.
Her bra came off without ceremony. The clasp went under Eleanor’s thumb; Chloe felt the small mechanical click and then the loosening. Eleanor pulled the straps down her arms with the same precision she used for everything.
Her mouth went to Chloe’s breast.
Chloe’s hand found the back of Eleanor’s neck. The hair at the nape was shorter than she had thought. The skin underneath was hot.
Eleanor’s hand undid the button of Chloe’s jeans. The zip. Her fingers slid inside the waistband — not into the underwear, not yet, only the waistband — and the small held pause there made Chloe lift her hips toward her without thinking.
Eleanor said, against her sternum, “Look at me.”
Chloe looked.
She did not, in looking, stop herself from saying what arrived at her mouth.
“Eleanor,” she said.
It was the third time she had said the name aloud.
Eleanor — who had been about to move her hand — stopped. She held herself, for the count of a breath, exactly where she was. Her forehead came to rest against Chloe’s collarbone. Her free hand came up to the side of Chloe’s face and stayed there.
“Please,” Eleanor said. Quietly. Against Chloe’s skin. “Please don’t say it like that.”
It was not, Chloe registered, an instruction.
It was — the small honest part of her translating in real time — the closest Eleanor had come, in four months, to asking for mercy.
Chloe did not, in the moment, do anything with the request.
She put her own hand against the back of Eleanor’s neck, where her own hair was loose at the nape, and held her there for the next ten seconds without moving.
When Eleanor eventually lifted her head, her eyes were not wet, but they were closer to wet than Chloe had ever seen them.
She did not, when she resumed, resume immediately.
She waited, half a beat, until Chloe — by some small unspoken arrangement — nodded once.
Chloe looked.
Eleanor’s hand moved. Two fingers, slow, deliberate, against her through the cotton first, then under it, then in.
Chloe’s breath left her in a sound that was not, by any measure, quiet.
Eleanor kissed her — hard, this time — and kept her hand where it was.
She did not, after that, look away from Chloe’s face.
Not for any part of the next several minutes.
Her fingers moved with the precision she brought to most things and she watched, with the attention she brought to most things, what her precision did.
Chloe’s hips lifted. Chloe’s hand fisted in the front of the thin white shirt and pulled it loose.
When she came it was on Eleanor’s hand with her face against Eleanor’s shoulder and her cry caught in the cotton of the shirt.
Eleanor did not move her hand. She held it, where it was, until the small involuntary tightening had finished.
Then she withdrew it.
She kissed Chloe’s mouth once, slowly.
She said, “Stay there.”
Chloe sat up.
Her hair was down. The fire was on her shoulder.
The rug was warm under her hand. She pushed Eleanor — Eleanor let herself be pushed — onto her back.
The thin white shirt was already half-undone.
The buttons that remained Chloe took herself, slowly, one at a time.
She kissed the skin under each one as it opened.
Eleanor’s breath was loud now in the quiet of the room.
Chloe undid the button of her trousers. The zip. Eleanor lifted her hips without being asked.
“Chloe.”
“What.”
“Tell me what you want.”
It was the question. The third time it had been asked. Chloe did not, this time, answer in one syllable.
“This.”
She moved down.
She had not, before this evening, done this with a woman. The fact arrived in her body as a small startled clarity that did not, when she got to it, slow her down. Eleanor’s thigh against her cheek. The warmth of her. Her hand in Chloe’s hair, fisted, not pulling.
She used her mouth.
She used it slowly at first and then, as Eleanor’s hand tightened in her hair, less slowly. She used her fingers also. She watched, where she could, what worked. She listened to Eleanor’s breath. She listened, after a while, to the small involuntary changes in it.
Eleanor came quietly.
It was one sharp inhalation. One bitten-off sound. The fingers in Chloe’s hair gripped, held, did not release.
Chloe stayed.
When Chloe lifted her head, Eleanor’s eyes were closed and her chest was moving fast and a single tear had gone from the corner of her right eye into her hair at the temple.
Chloe touched it, briefly, with the side of her thumb.
Eleanor turned her face away — not from the touch, but in the way one turned one’s face away from a thing one had not, in advance, agreed to give.
Chloe did not pursue it. She brought her thumb back to herself.
The wetness of Eleanor’s tear was, for the next several seconds, on the pad of Chloe’s thumb, against her own bottom lip, while she waited for Eleanor to be ready to be looked at again.
Chloe did not, in the moment, comment on the tear.
She lay her head against Eleanor’s stomach and waited.
They stayed.
The fire had gone lower. The lamp was still on. Chloe’s ear was against Eleanor’s ribs and she could hear, from there, Eleanor’s heart slowing — not fast, then less fast, then ordinary.
Eleanor’s hand moved from Chloe’s hair to her back.
Her fingers traced the line of Chloe’s shoulder blade. Once. Then again.
“Come upstairs.”
“Yes.”
“Bring your shirt.”
“No.”
Eleanor laughed — small, surprised, into the top of Chloe’s head.
“All right.”
The bedroom was at the back of the house.
Chloe had not been in it. It was darker than the sitting room. One lamp, on Eleanor’s side. A grey bedspread, turned back. A book face-down on the bedside table. The window looked out onto the garden Chloe never looked at, which was now a black square against a slightly less black sky.
Eleanor sat on the edge of the bed.
Chloe stood between her knees.
Eleanor finished undressing her — slowly this time, without urgency, the jeans down, the underwear gone, the bare skin under her hand for the first time without anything between her palm and Chloe at all.
She pulled her down.
Chloe sat on top of her. Eleanor’s shirt was open. The thin cotton fell to either side. Her bra was somewhere on the rug downstairs. Her trousers were on the floor of the bedroom. Her hair was on the pillow and her hand was on the small of Chloe’s back.
Chloe kissed her.
She kissed her slowly. She kissed her for a long time. There was no hurry in this one. The dam, she registered without registering it, had broken in the sitting room. What they were doing now was something else.
She moved against her.
Eleanor’s hand stayed at the small of her back. Eleanor’s mouth on her throat. The slow build, this time, was a chosen one. Chloe’s knees on either side of Eleanor’s thighs. Eleanor’s fingers, again, slow, between them.
Chloe came a second time with her forehead against Eleanor’s and Eleanor’s hand on her hip and her own hand in Eleanor’s hair and the lamp light low against both their faces.
She lowered herself onto Eleanor.
She did not, for some time, move.
Chloe fell asleep on Eleanor’s chest.
She did not register the falling asleep. She registered the warmth, and the slowing of her own breath, and the small steady weight of Eleanor’s hand on her shoulder, and then she did not register anything for some hours.
Eleanor did not sleep.
She lay awake with her left hand at the small of Chloe’s back and her right hand on Chloe’s shoulder. Her eyes were on the ceiling. The lamp was still on. She did not get up to turn it off. She did not, for the first half-hour, move at all.
Then, slowly, her thumb moved once against the bone of Chloe’s shoulder.
Only once.
She kept it there.